A Winter Luau to benefit the Hampton Lifeguard Association is to be held next Thursday from 7 to 11 p.m. at East by Northeast restaurant in Montauk. John Ryan Sr. of East Hampton and Mary Lownes of Amagansett are handling reservations.
Tickets bought in advance cost $75 per couple and $40 per person. They will cost $85 and $45 at the door.
While the young East Hampton High School boys swim team, which is combined with Pierson and Bridgehampton, didn’t qualify anyone for the states at the recent Suffolk County meet, the Bonackers, who finished third in League III, behind Hauppauge and Harborfields this season — their highest finish in the program’s three years — acquitted themselves well.
Thomas Brierley, in placing fifth in the 100-yard backstroke in 56.74 seconds, a career best, missed the state cut by a second.
The 400 freestyle relay team of Rob Rewinski, Robert Anderson, Trevor Mott, and Brierley placed ninth in 3:37.90, a season-best. Bonac’s 200 medley and 200 freestyle relay teams turned in seasonal-best performances, as well, the 200 team of Dan Hartner, Paul Dorego, Brierley, and Mott finishing 10th in 1:37.08, and the 200 medley team of Hartner, Chris Kalbacher, Adam Heller, and Peter Skerys finishing 16th in 1:53.80.
Anderson, Rewinski, a Bridgehampton student, and Kalbacher are freshmen; Brierley and Mott are sophomores; Heller’s a Pierson junior, and Hartner, Dorego, and Skerys, all Pierson students, are seniors.
Thursday, March 1
GIRLS BASKETBALL, Center Moriches eighth grade team at East Hampton Middle School, 4:30 p.m.
Friday, March 2
BOYS VOLLEYBALL, East Hampton Middle School vs. Montauk, Montauk Playhouse, 4 p.m.
Saturday, March 3
WRESTLING, Port Jefferson at East Hampton Middle School, 10 a.m.
Sunday, March 4
STRETCHING, for men, with Carolyn Giacalone, Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter, 10:30 a.m.-noon.
Monday, March 5
SPRING SPORTS, practices begin, 3 p.m.
Tuesday, March 6
GIRLS BASKETBALL, East Hampton Middle School seventh grade team at Montauk School, scrimmage, 4 p.m.
BOYS VOLLEYBALL, East Hampton Middle School team at Springs, 4 p.m.
WRESTLING, Hampton Bays at East Hampton Middle School, 4:30 p.m.
BOYS BASKETBALL, Long Island Class C championship game, Pierson vs. East Rockaway, Farmingdale State College, 5 p.m.
Wednesday, March 7
GIRLS BASKETBALL, East Hampton eighth grade team at Pierson, and Pierson seventh grade team at East Hampton Middle School, 4:30 p.m.
BADMINTON, pickup games on three courts, Amagansett School, 7-9 p.m.
Thirty-one years ago, Dick Baker, who before he began selling real estate had been a physical education teacher at the Amagansett School for 15 years, inaugurated weekly badminton nights there from the fall through spring.
During a conversation at The Star the other day, the group’s founder, who is back to playing after having got a new hip on Nov. 21, said, “We’ve got a good group now, from 16 to 18.”
About half were women, he said, adding that badminton was a sport in which men and women can compete on an even footing. “As a matter of fact, the best player we’ve ever had in our 31 years was a woman, a 19 or 20-year-old au pair from Denmark. She played with us for a year. Nobody — and I was playing a little better then — could take more than 8 or 9 points from her in a game of 15.”
The pickup games, in singles and doubles, are held every Wednesday at Amagansett’s gym from 7 to 9 p.m., between September and the first week of May. “We could only fit one court in the old gym, which was destroyed by fire, but, with the new one, we can fit three.”
Badminton, as this writer, who, with Baker as his partner, lost to his wife, Pam, and Lynn Baldwin 21-13 at last week’s session, can attest, is a demanding game even though the court is small and narrow.
“It’s much quicker than tennis,” Baker said, a conclusion with which this writer, a doubles tennis player, could not take issue. “There’s very little preparation time. You’re not hanging out at the baseline, you’re on top of each other, hitting back and forth. In the professional matches the shuttle comes off the racket at 275 miles per hour, though, because of its shape, it decelerates.”
“I think it helps a bit to be a racket player,” he continued, in reply to a question, “but people who are naturally athletic can pick it up fairly quickly. If they have the eye-hand coordination required to hit the shuttle, the next step is the footwork, which is very important. The service line in doubles is not as far back as it is in singles. In singles, the majority of serves are high and deep; in doubles, they’re short and low. You get one chance, no second chances, so you want to make your serves count.”
Essentially, he added, there were “three shots in badminton — the clear, hit high and deep to move your opponent back, the smash, hit with your shoulder turned and with a wrist flick, and the drop.”
“When you play defense in doubles,” he said, “you want to be side by side, but when you’re on offense one of you should be back and the other up front. So, say you and I are playing together, I’m in back and the shuttle is cleared to me. If I smash the return, you want to be at the net — as I smash you take two steps toward the net. If I clear, you take two steps back. That’s all there is to it, but it’s a lot to think about. If you watch badminton videos on the Internet, don’t try watching the shuttle — watch how they move their feet. It’s all about footwork. They hit and move, hit and move. The biggest problem new players have is getting back into position. They want to watch their shots, but by that time it’s all over. . . . You want to make your opponents move their feet, you don’t want to just hit it at them, and you want to go where they’re weakest, which often is the backhand corner.”
Baker laughed when told that Eric Wittenberg, one of the group’s players, had replied, “In this game if you blink, it’s gone,” after this writer had said the large tennis rackets of today frequently lulled him into taking his eye off the ball.
Asked what it was he loved about badminton, Baker, who recently finished up with physical therapy and is planning to follow up with a circuit training routine of his own devising, said, “It’s a great cardiovascular workout, and, unlike basketball, which is tough on the knees and the ankles, it’s a sport you can play for a long time. It’s the perfect workout. And I like the fact that women can participate with the men.”
In 1994, when Baker had him give a clinic at the school, Steve Butler, an Englishman and former pro, said he thought badminton was one of the world’s five toughest sports, in terms of its physical and mental demands — up there with boxing, martial arts, cross-country skiing, and mountain running.
“Oh, and we’ve had some celebrities play here,” Baker said in parting. “I got a phone call one day in July . . . this was sometime in the ’80s. Paul Newman and his protege, James Naughton, who had been an excellent baseball player before he blew out his knee sliding into second base, were here and they wanted to play.”
“Paul Newman was 70 or 71 then. He’d been an intercollegiate badminton player and he loved playing. I couldn’t play because I’d just had my knee scoped, so I had Pam and Richard Dunphy and Michael Ruddy, an Irishman who’s the mason for Seven Sons Landscaping and a very good badminton player, play them. Pam played every game. An hour and a half to two hours in a hot gym on a July afternoon. Naughton and Paul Newman didn’t win a game. Paul Newman said he wasn’t going to leave until they did.”
Twelve years ago, after his team had regained the county Class D title by defeating Greenport 62-55, Carl Johnson, the Bridgehampton High School Killer Bees’ coach, said that the graduation of Maurice Manning had not meant the end of Killer Bee dominance in boys basketball.
And yet . . . and yet it seems hard to believe that Bridgehampton, whose well-known 20-year state championship run ended in 1998, had not, until Monday, won a county title since 2000.
In conversations before the game with this writer, who had brought with him The Star’s March 2, 2000, sports pages, Johnson and his assistant, Joe Zucker, smiled and said they were quite aware of how long it had been. And of course they had also reminded their players that they had lost to Greenport 58-35 in the 2010 title tilt.
The long drought was to end with a 73-50 victory in Suffolk East’s gym at Selden that evening, the same gym in which Manning and his Suffolk Community College teammates had, under Rich Wrase, won national junior college championships in 2003 and ’04.
And yet a Bees victory was by no means assured. “They beat us by 11 at their place early in the season,” Zucker said before the game, “and we beat them by 30 at ours. . . . We have a big height advantage, so if we can get inside I like our chances.”
While they may have lacked height, Greenport’s players did not lack quickness or combativeness, and there was no doubt that they had come to play. Parlaying a diamond-and-two defense to their advantage, the Porters jumped out to a 15-6 lead before Davion Cooper, a tall, slim freshman, traded places with Bump Hemby.
“Carl and I agreed that if they played a junk defense, keying on Caanan [Campbell, Bridgehampton’s senior 6-foot-4-inch high-scoring forward] and Jason [Hopson, Campbell’s junior 6-3 counterpart], we’d send in Davion to give us some more length on offense.”
Cooper, who was to go on to become Bridgehampton’s consensus M.V.P., began to turn things around right away, going on a 7-0 run of his own, with two layups and a 3-pointer, in the period’s final minute.
By the midway point of the second quarter, with 5 more points from Cooper, who continued to sneak in for layups when he wasn’t hitting from the outside, and 4 by Tylik Furman, the team’s aggressive eighth-grade point guard, the Bees had the lead, at 20-19, and the battle was joined.
With two minutes gone in the third, a fastbreak layup by Gavin Dibble wrested the lead back for Greenport, at 36-34, but the Bees, whose taller defenders were to wear their smaller opponents down as the game progressed, poured it on thereafter, with Cooper, Hopson, and Campbell draining 3s and with Furman (two), Campbell, and Cooper chipping in with 2’s during a 17-3 run that treated the Bees to a 51-39 lead as the fourth quarter began.
Cooper finished with a game and career-high 24 points; Hopson and Furman each had 16, and Campbell, 11.
“We knew what he [Cooper] could do,” Johnson said later in talking with sportswriters. “Like any young player, he’s up and down, but when he made that first shot he got confident. He’s got ice in his veins! . . . Davion got it going and then our defense buckled down.”
The Bees will go on the road now. They are to play a regional championship game versus the Rockland-Westchester winner on March 10. (Johnson said he’d scout those counties’ finals.)
The Final Four tournament is to be contested at Glens Falls over the March 16-18 weekend.
To get to the county final, Bridgehampton, which had lost by 10 points at the Ross School on Feb. 13, turned the tables on the Cosmos in a Class D outbracket game Friday.
The star of that 72-62 win was Hopson, who tallied 19 points that day vis a vis the 4 he’d scored at Ross four days before. “He’d rolled his ankle and wasn’t 100 percent in that game at Ross,” Johnson said.
Ross led 36-31 at the half, but the Bees tied it at 38-38 two minutes into the third on a 3-point play by Campbell, after which Hopson canned a 3-pointer, one of four he had that afternoon. Bridgehampton was unheaded after that.
East Hampton High’s varsity football and girls lacrosse teams are to move down a division in the next school year, each having cut ties, at least temporarily, with Pierson High School in Sag Harbor. In addition, next fall’s boys volleyball team will be combined with Bridgehampton.
“We’re still an ‘A’ school,” said East Hampton’s athletic director, Joe Vas, “though, instead of being the smallest A school in Conference III, we’ll be a good-sized one in Conference IV.”
In football, the Bonackers were 0-8 in Division III last fall, and in the past five years East Hampton’s record has been 11-30. “We’ll be playing schools closer to our size, which will be a little more realistic,” Vas said. “Still, there are some very good teams in the conference, including John Glenn, Mount Sinai, Shoreham, and Babylon.”
Babylon used to be a thorn in East Hampton’s side in the ’80s, a role Comsewogue took over in the ’90s, and in recent years it’s been a virtual briar patch. Geographically, the shift could be a plus too, given the fact that a number of the Division IV schools, Stony Brook, Shoreham, Mercy, Greenport, Hampton Bays, and Southampton among them, are closer to home than Huntington, Harborfields, and Kings Park.
“Looking at our enrollment in grades 9 through 11 of the previous year, we found that our population was 662, by ourselves,” said Vas. “Continuing to be combined with Pierson, which had no players on our football varsity this fall, would have put us over. (Forty percent of the feeder schools’ enrollments are applied in reckoning divisional placements.)
“We’ll remain combined in football with Bridgehampton because their numbers don’t put us over, and we’re still combined with Pierson in football at the jayvee and middle school level. We’ve got two Pierson players on the jayvee. . . . I’m aware that there’s been a tradition of being combined with Pierson, so we’ll revisit the numbers question every year.”
East Hampton had moved down a division in girls lacrosse for the same reasons, Vas said. “We’ve got no kids from Pierson, and playing schools more our size ought to be a benefit.”
Dropping into a division with Southampton, whose football team also went 0-8 this past fall, raises the prospect of reviving one of New York State’s oldest rivalries, which dates to 1923. Whether the two teams will play each other in the fall won’t be known until the 2012 schedules come out in May. Vas said he thinks East Hampton “will be in the middle of the pack” in the preseason rankings, “say fifth or sixth among the 14 schools.”
To honor the East Hampton-Southampton rivalry, the Bridgehampton National Bank in 1982 began presenting the winner of the game with a handsome silver Hampton Cup. There have been only two such games played in the past 19 years, with Southampton winning both — in 1993 by a score of 14-8, and in 2006, by a score of 28-13.
That win of Southampton’s in ’06, the year before Bill Barbour Jr. took over from David MacGarva as Bonac’s head coach, was its 49th in the series. East Hampton has only won 13 times — its last victory coming in 1985 — and there have been three ties.
The A.D. said a recent meeting Barbour held with prospective footballers from seventh grade up and their parents was “well attended.”
In the coming month, a group of four seventh and eighth-grade “leaders” picked by Gary Stanis, who brought traveling Police Athletic League football to East Hampton in 2008, and Don Reese, the P.A.L. president, are to embark on a 10-week pilot course in strength, speed, agility, and nutrition training at Rich Decker’s Studio 89 off Clay Pit Road in Sag Harbor.
Stanis and Reese hope the four boys’ progress will persuade about 20 of their peers to join them for a 12-week program at Studio 89 this summer, and further hope that this early training will help to strengthen East Hampton’s football program.
“All the schools up the Island are doing this,” Stanis said in an article on the subject in November. “By the time you get into the weight room at the high school it’s too late.”
The week past was a stellar one for Cameron Yusko, a senior captain of East Hampton High’s boys basketball team. During it, he was named, by virtue of his 98.5 unweighted average, as East Hampton’s valedictorian and received Channel 12’s scholar-athlete-of-the-month award.
He was only the fourth Bonacker to be so honored since Robin Streck first won the award in the fall of 1990.
Yusko, who’s going to attend Duke University in the fall — where he’s wanted to go, he said, since he was 10-years-old — is a three-sport athlete (golf, basketball, and baseball) and was a co-captain of the golf and basketball teams.
“All the teams Cameron’s played on in the past year have made the playoffs,” said his golf coach, Claude Beudert. He’s equally well-rounded academically. When asked if he’d decided yet on a college major, he said, “I’m undecided, but I do like biology.”
During a visit to the school Friday, Channel 12 interviewed two of the honoree’s coaches, Beudert and Ed Bahns, the baseball mentor, as well as the athletic director Joe Vas. The award-winner surfed the Internet, and stroked softly-tossed baseballs and hit some golf balls on the school’s turf field for the cameras.
The scholar-athlete segment is to be aired on Channel 12 Tuesday on the hour from 5 p.m.
A six-year varsity golfer, a two-year varsity basketball player, and a four-year veteran of the varsity baseball team, Yusko said that the day last spring when the county-championship golf team won the Long Island championship “was one of the best days of my life,” and added, that he thought the baseball team will make the playoffs this spring in spite of the fact that one of its best pitchers, Maykell Guzman, is now concentrating on the sport in the Dominican Republic.
East Hampton High’s underclassmen got a taste of the playoffs at Shoreham-Wading River Saturday night, and, as a result, Bill McKee, the boys’ coach, said after the 51-40 loss that he hoped they’d play in the interim and come back ready to go further in the postseason next winter.
“Our goal was to try to do something in the playoffs this year, but, in the end, we were happy to get there,” said McKee, who graduates two seniors — Cameron Yusko, a 3-point shooter, and Patrick McGuirk, who, at 6 feet 2 inches was the team’s tallest player.
Unfortunately, McGuirk, who could have been expected to give East Hampton a stronger inside presence at Shoreham, didn’t play much this season, because of a preseason appendectomy and, at the end, because of a broken thumb suffered in a 42-point loss at Shoreham on Feb. 7.
“Don’t say if Patrick played we would have won,” McKee cautioned, when his name came up, “but he certainly would have helped.”
As it was, an energetic defense designed to limit the Wildcats’ offensive rebounding was quite effective. “They killed us on the boards in that second game,” McKee said. But the Bonackers shot poorly, until mounting a pleasant 18-3 run in the fourth quarter, giving the team’s many fans who’d made the trip reason to look forward to next year.
A 22-8 third quarter proved fatal. A basket in the lane by Juan Cuevas, assisted by Yusko, got that period going, but then the home team went on a 15-0 tear that effectively put the game away. During that dispiriting span, East Hampton went 0-for-8, until, with three minutes left, Thomas King netted a 3-pointer — one of three he was to have that night — for 31-19.
With 4:26 remaining, East Hampton trailed by 26, obviating any chance of repeating its fabled comeback here against the same team on Jan. 10, a game in which the Bonackers uncannily erased a 15-point Shoreham lead in the final five-and-a-half minutes to win 57-56 on King’s coast-to-coast layup.
Still, the final minutes were fun. East Hampton inbounded after a timeout and Cuevas drew a foul as he drove to the hoop. He made both free throws, and then, following a miss from 3-point range by Yusko, King hit a 3, prompting another timeout, after which Cuevas chipped in with a 3 and Brandon Hughes, a sophomore brought up from Bonac’s strong junior varssity, made a 3-point play.
Enter Andre Cherrington, a junior forward, who put back his own miss for 49-35. Thomas Nelson, a sophomore forward, answered a Shoreham basket by putting back a miss of King’s from beyond the arc, and Cherrington hit a 3 before the final buzzer sounded.
Thus ended East Hampton’s season, at 8-10, though with King, Cuevas, Danny McKee, Nelson, Donja Davis, Cherrington, and Hughes coming back, and given the strong jayvee, McKee can expect good results next year.
In parting, he said he hoped his charges would play basketball in the off-season, “and I’d also like to thank Joe Vas [East Hampton’s athletic director] for having supported us the way he did. It was great to see him there at the playoff game and all the fans.”
For East Hampton’s girls, who had been expected to make the playoffs, but did not, the 7-10 (4-8 league) campaign was a bit disappointing. They had also been urged by their coaches to play in the off-season, but for the most part did not.
Howard Wood, East Hampton’s coach, was hoping for a strong farewell in the regular-season finale with Westhampton Beach on Feb. 14, but did not get it as the Hurricanes, who were playing for a playoff spot, wound up winning 35-24.
The Bonackers pulled to 18-14 early in the third quarter on a basket by Nicole Miksinski, with an assist from Sarah Johnson, and, soon after, Kaelyn Ward, East Hampton’s star junior point guard, made it 18-17 by way of a 3-point play, but thereafter the visitors pulled away thanks to an 11-1 run during which East Hampton went 0-for-7 and turned the ball over three times.
With four minutes left, East Hampton trailed by 9, but couldn’t make any headway. Johnson, the senior center, fouled out with three minutes remaining.
Ward, a fine all-around player who drew most of East Hampton’s opponents’ attention, Jackie Messemer, a resilient freshman with good moves, and Quincy King ought to give reason for hope in 2012-13.
The Pierson (Sag Harbor) High School Whalers won the county Class C championship at Suffolk Community College-Selden Monday by virtue of Forrest Loesch’s last-second desperation 3-pointer that stunned Stony Brook 34-32.
It was the first county championship for the Whalers since 1994 when they won the Class D title with Tyler Ratcliffe, John Schroeder, Jeremy Brandt, and Eric Bramoff.
Pierson, which made it to the C final in similar fashion, edging Port Jefferson 36-35 Friday behind Loesch’s 4 overtime points, was to have played Bridgehampton, the D champ, in the county’s C-D game at the State College at Farmingdale yesterday.
The B-C-D game is to be played tomorrow at Suffolk Community College-Selden at 6 p.m. The county small schools championship game is to be played at Farmingdale Wednesday at 7:30 p.m.
As for the state Class C tourney, the Whalers are to play East Rockaway for the Long Island championship at Farmingdale on March 6 at 5 p.m.
Friday, February 24
BOYS BASKETBALL, county B-C-D game, Suffolk Community College-Selden, 6 p.m.
Sunday, February 26
TRIATHLONING, second session of four-part Indoor Tri series, Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter, 9 a.m.
STRETCHING, partners stretch class with Rosie Orlando, Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter, 11:30 a.m.
RUNNING FILM, “Unbreakable: The Western States 100,” Guild Hall, East Hampton, 4 p.m.
Wednesday, February 29
BADMINTON, open play on three courts, Amagansett School, 7-9 p.m.
BOYS BASKETBALL, county small schools championship game, State College at Farmingdale, 7:30 p.m.